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My wife and I saw two movies this week: The Ugly Truth and The Hurt Locker.

One’s a bomb and the other’s about bombs.

Let’s start with the clunker.

The Ugly Truth

The Ugly Truth aspires to be one of those cute, romantic love stories where a crude, misogynist, jaded hunk is won over by a smart, sexy, neurotic babe.

Gerard Butler plays the hunk, Michael Chadway, and Katherine Heigl plays the babe, Abby Richter.

Butler and Heigl manage to pull off crude and neurotic, but cute and romantic were apparently left on the cutting room floor.

Chadway is a male chauvinist shock jock who is hired by a local television station to boost its flagging news show ratings. Richter is the unlucky-in-love producer of the show.

There is nothing whatsoever charismatic, charming or endearing about Chadway. And he isn’t just a chauvinist, he’s a serial masher. He grabs, slaps or pinches Heigl’s butt at every opportunity. He makes graphic sexual comments to her every chance he gets.

My God, this stuff stopped being funny when I turned sixteen.

If you think  Chadway has no respect for the female gender, you should hear what he thinks of guys:

Never talk about your problems. Men don’t either listen or care.

And that’s just one of his printable theories.

Chadway is an anti-social cretin. He hates men and women alike.

The Ugly Truth, living as it does in the land of stereotypes, desperately wants us to believe that Chadway is a man’s man.

Bullshit!

I know a few men’s men and I can assure you that if Chadway had told their sisters about what all men want to do to them, they’d pop him in the face so hard the left side would be crooked too.

Chadway is a jerk and an asshole, character traits which the creative geniuses in Hollywood apparently believe combine to make him  “Mister Right.”

The only good thing I can say about this movie is that I actually found it believable that Abby would fall for a neanderthal like Chadway instead of the respectful, polite, gentlemanly Doctor she’d been dating.

Although I am sure this is not what Heigl intended to portray, her character Richter hates herself so much that when given the choice between two men, one who is respectful, generous and thoughtful and another who is crude, insulting and selfish, she chooses the latter.

A heck of a lesson for teenage girls, huh? Pick the guy who treats you like shit.

In real life if a guy treated a self-respecting woman the way Chadway treats Richter, she’d smack him back to the Pleistocene from whence he came.

Someone should have had the good sense to diffuse The Ugly Truth before it hit the theaters. This thought brings me to the second film I saw this weekend.

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker is about three soldiers on a tour of duty in Iraq whose mission it is to diffuse bombs.

I was surprised by this movie’s lack of an agenda.

It makes no statement about war – or at least no cliched Hollywood one like “war is bad” or “the innocent suffer the most” or “Bush and Cheney are war criminals.”

Of course, that’s not to say it doesn’t make any statement.

By the time we meet the lead character James (played chillingly by Jeremy Renner) he’s already diffused 872 bombs (he keeps count).

This is apparently some kind of record.

James has become so obsessed with his job that he collects parts of the bombs he’s diffused in a locker under his bed.

In harrowing scene after harrowing scene, James thrusts himself (against the wishes of his comrades, the lonely Sanborn and and the fearful Eldridge) into one absurdly dangerous situation after another.

He’s fearless. Or more accurately, he’s addicted to fear; to the adrenaline rush that it creates.

The three soldiers manage to survive Iraq despite James’ recklessness and we follow James home to suburbia, wife and child. But nothing there can compare to the high he gets from diffusing bombs. Certainly not slicing carrots, de-leaving the roof or shopping for cereal. Even playing with his child and making love to his wife have lost the power to move him.

James is a casualty of war not because of any physical wound he receives, but because war has deprived him of the ability to enjoy life. Like other drugs, war has given James the illusion of aliveness while slowly and deliberately killing him.

James re-enlists, returning ironically to the only place that isn’t like death for him.

This movie reminded me of the more overt anti-war film, Deer Hunter. The character played by Christopher Walken, after being caught by the enemy, is forced by his Viet Cong captors to play Russian roulette for their gambling amusement. The event is so traumatic for him that he becomes obsessed by the game and, after the war has ended, stays in Vietnam and plays it for money until he blows his brains out.

War is a drug.

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